Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov

Pavel Alekseyevich Cherenkov
(1904 - 1990)

Soviet physicist who shared the 1958 Nobel Prize for Physics with fellow
Soviet scientists Igor Y. Tamm and Ilya M. Frank for their investigation
of the phenomenon called Cherenkov radiation. Cherenkov discovered that
light is emitted by electrons as they pass through a transparent medium
at a speed higher than the speed of light in that medium.
Cherenkov graduated from Voronezh State University in 1928; he later
became a research student at the P.N. Lebedev Physical Institute of
the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (now the Russian Academy
of Sciences). In 1934, in the course of his dissertation research, he
observed that electrons produced a faint blue glow when passing through
a transparent liquid at high velocity. This phenomenon, which was interpreted
by Tamm and Frank, led to the development of the Cherenkov counter,
or Cherenkov detector, which was later used extensively in experimental
nuclear and particle physics. Cherenkov continued to do research in
nuclear physics at the Lebedev Institute, where he became a full professor
in 1959.